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Dismayed at the lack of post-invasion planning in the Defense Department (see August 2002), the Joint Chiefs of Staff advance their own proposal for a military command to govern Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insists on a split between military and civilian functions; he places Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith in charge of planning for the civilian administration. Feith, whom CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks calls “the dumbest f_cking guy on the planet,” is an academic with no experience at administration on such a level, and will be roundly excoriated for his incompetence in handling the assignment. Author and public administration professor Alasdair Roberts will later write that beyond Feith’s lack of competence is a bureaucratic failure: the Pentagon “was simply reaching beyond its abilities.” A RAND report will later find the Defense Department “lacked experience, expertise, funding authority, local knowledge, and established contacts with other potential civilian organizations” to do the task it had set for itself. Roberts will write that the Pentagon will substitute improvisation for meticulous planning (see January 2003). [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126, 134]

Jay Garner. [Source: US Army]The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) is created by the Pentagon to direct the post-war administration of Iraq, and signed into existence by President Bush. Its head, retired Army General Jay Garner, ostensibly reports to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith (see Fall 2002), but Garner will later say that once he is in Iraq proper, General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) “will be my boss.” ORHA is later renamed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). David Kay, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and a former UN weapons inspector, had initially been selected to head the office, but he declined the invitation. Associates of Kay tell the New York Times that Kay felt the new agency seemed relatively uninterested in the task of promoting democracy. [New York Times, 2/23/2003; New York Times, 4/2/2003; Roberts, 2008, pp. 126, 134] Garner is considered an excellent selection, having led the relief effort for the Kurds of northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. But he faces an uphill battle, as ORHA’s functionality is plagued from the outset by a severe lack of time, uncertain funding, and incessant interdepartmental strife, particularly between the State and Defense Departments. Most ORHA workers will not have reported for duty by the time the invasion begins. And attempts to recruit experts from other agencies will be blocked by Feith and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who impose strict ideological and bureaucratic restrictions on Garner’s selections for his staff. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126, 134]

Appearing before the House Budget Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz publicly contradicts General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, for saying that it will take “several hundred thousand soldiers” to successfully occupy Iraq (see February 25, 2003). Greeted as Liberators - Wolfowitz says: “We can’t be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators, although based on what Iraqi-Americans told me in Detroit a week ago, many of them—most of them with families in Iraq—I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down. In short, we don’t know what the requirement will be, but we can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.” Wolfowitz says there’s no “record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another.” [CNN, 2/28/2003; Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 194] He restates the opinions of the top civilians at the Pentagon that it will take somewhere around 100,000 troops to secure postwar Iraq. Wolfowitz’s statement is echoed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who says, “The idea that it would take several hundred thousand US forces I think is far off the mark.” Neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz mention Shinseki by name, but the connection is clear. A spokesman for Shinseki, Colonel Joe Curtin, says that Shinseki stands by his judgment. “He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment,” says Curtin. [New York Times, 2/28/2003] Shinseki will retire shortly after the contretemps with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (see June 13, 2003). Iraqi Reconstruction Chief's Opinion - Reflecting on Shinseki’s public humilation, Iraqi reconstruction chief Jay Garner (see January 2003) will say, “When Shinseki said, Hey, it’s going to take 300,000 or 400,000 soldiers, they crucified him. They called me up the day after that, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They called me the next day and they said, Did you see what Shinseki said? And I said yes. And they said, Well, that can’t be possible. And I said, Well, let me give you the only piece of empirical data I have. In 1991 [during the Gulf War], I owned 5 percent of the real estate in Iraq, and I had 22,000 trigger pullers. And on any day I never had enough. So you can take 5 percent—you can take 22,000 and multiply that by 20. Hey, here’s probably the ballpark, and I didn’t have Baghdad. And they said, Thank you very much. So I got up and left.” Garner’s estimate would require some 440,000 troops in Iraq. [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]

General Jay Garner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA—see January 2003), admits to reporters, “We started very slowly” in preparing for handling the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126]Garner Knew Problems Would Arise - Garner will later say: “When I went to see [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld at the end of January [2003], I said, OK, I’ll do this for the next few months for you. I said, you know, Let me tell you something, Mr. Secretary. George Marshall started in 1942 working on a 1945 problem. You’re starting in February working on what’s probably a March or April problem. And he said, I know, but we have to do the best with the time that we have. So that kind of frames everything.” 'Never Recovered' - Sir Jeremy Greenstock, currently Britain’s special representative to Iraq, will add: “The administration of Iraq never recovered [from the failure to plan]. It was a vacuum in security that became irremediable, at least until the surge of 2007. And to that extent, four years were not only wasted but allowed to take on the most terrible cost because of that lack of planning, lack of resources put in on the ground. And I see that lack of planning as residing in the responsibility of the Pentagon, which had taken charge, the office of the secretary of defense, with the authority of the vice president and the president, obviously, standing over that department of government.” [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]

As the initial media exuberance over the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq (see March 19-20, 2003) begins to fade, questions begin to mount about the plans for rebuilding Iraq after the invasion and inevitable toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime. Bush administration officials had assumed that military operations would end in 30 days, according to White House briefings. Some senior administration officials admit to the New York Times that that assumption now seems “overly optimistic.” As reported by David Sanger, those officials “say that the American military will likely need to retain tight control over the country for longer than they anticipated.” But administration officials insist that they remain committed to giving over control of the country to the newly liberated Iraqis very soon. “The Iraqi people will administer Iraq,” says White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, adding that President Bush is as committed to that goal now as he was before the war began. However, some military officials now admit that the Iraqi resistance is far stiffer than had been anticipated, and the reception of American occupiers by the Iraqi people has been far less welcoming than US planners foresaw. The White House says that initial plans for an “Iraqi Interim Authority” as the genesis of a new Iraqi government have been put on hold until Baghdad can be secured and the remnants of the Hussein regime can be eliminated. Similarly, plans to turn over power to local Iraqi governance have also been delayed indefinitely, until cities like Basra can be purged of guerrilla resistance. “There were many of us who hoped to be creating a new government even before Iraq was fully under coalition control,” says one senior official. The White House intended to demonstrate quickly that “this is a liberation, not an occupation.” Now, “[t]hat may not be possible for some weeks.” To make matters more difficult, turf wars between the State Department and the Pentagon are inhibiting efforts to implement post-invasion plans, with Defense Department officials such as Douglas Feith blocking the hiring of outside experts for General Jay Garner’s reconstruction team (see January 2003). State officials say that Feith and other Pentagon ideologues want to place “like-minded former officials who have strong views about what a new Iraq should look like” in those slots, a charge which the Pentagon denies. [New York Times, 4/2/2003]

US military Central Command (CENTCOM) commander General Tommy Franks issues an order formally recognizing the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA - see January 2003), an ad hoc, improvised organization to be headed by former diplomat and business executive L. Paul Bremer. A 2006 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction will call the CPA the “de facto government of Iraq.” But for all its power, its legal status will remain unclear throughout its existence. A 2005 Congressional report will note: “Whether the CPA was a federal agency was unclear. Competing explanations for how it was established contribute to the uncertainty.… Some executive branch documents supported the notion that it was created by the president, possibly as a result of a National Security Presidential Directive. This document, if it exists, has not been made available.” Whether the legal ambiguity is deliberate is unclear, but it will be exploited. The Defense Department will not allow federal auditors to investigate CPA spending because, the department says, it is not a federal agency. Contractors are warned that if the CPA breaks contracts, they might not have recourse in federal courts. Employees who suspect contractor fraud are told they cannot pursue any possible criminal actions under American law. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 127]

Retired General Jay Garner and his Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance staff arrive in Baghdad. They set up camp in a former presidential palace in the Qasr Al Fao compound that will serve as the temporary headquarters of ORHA (soon to be renamed the “Coalition Provisional Authority”). [Washington Post, 4/22/2003] Created by the Pentagon in January (see January 2003), ORHA has spent the last several weeks at a Hilton resort in Kuwait going over plans for administering post-invasion Iraq. Garner’s staff includes a mix of Pentagon and State Department personnel, including former and current US ambassadors, USAID bureaucrats, State Department officials, and British officials. Garner’s team is also comprised of a cadre of Paul Wolfowitz protégés referred to as the “true believers” or “Wolfie’s” people, whom the New York Times reports are “thought to be particularly fervent about trying to remake Iraq as a beacon of democracy and a country with a tilt toward Israel.” The Times also notes: “Few of these people are Iraqi experts. But some have come armed with books and articles on the history of Iraq. The chapters on the mistakes of British rule are well underlined.” [New York Times, 4/2/2003] Not only have Garner and his agency already lost critical time in getting underway, the Bush administration has no intention of allowing Garner to be part of ORHA’s reconstruction project. Both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the State Department, in a rare instance of agreement, want Garner replaced: the State Department wants a civilian to head the agency, while Rumsfeld not only wants to replace Garner with a more politically influential head (see May 11, 2003), he wants to fold ORHA into another organization being created “on the fly,” the aforementioned Coalition Provisional Authority. Three days after arriving in Baghdad, Garner is informed of the changes. The news quickly leaks to the press, resulting in Garner losing what little influence he had with Washington’s civilians and causing uncertainty about upcoming reconstruction efforts. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126-127]

Paul Bremer, head of the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, issues Order 2 formally dissolving the Iraqi Army and other vestiges of the old Ba’athist state. [CNN, 5/23/2003; Coalition Provisional Authority, 5/23/2003] The order, drafted by Douglas Feith’s office in the Pentagon and approved by the White House, triggers mass protests among the estimated 300,000 to 500,000 former Iraqi soldiers who are left without a job and who are given only a small, one-time, $20 emergency payment. [New York Times, 5/24/2003; Agence France Presse, 5/26/2003; Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 225] Together with the de-Ba’athification program, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army leads to some 500,000 people losing their source of income. [Los Angeles Times, 6/5/2003]Criticism - The action will be highly criticized as a major blunder of the war. The decision was made by Walter Slocombe, a security adviser to Bremer, who proclaims that “We don’t pay armies we defeated.” A colonel on Jay Garner’s staff (see January 2003) will later say: “My Iraqi friends tell me that this decision was what really spurred the nationalists to join the infant insurgency. We had advertised ourselves as liberators and turned on these people without so much as a second thought.” [Atlantic Monthly, 12/2005]Garner's Reaction - Garner himself will later speak on the subject, telling a Vanity Fair reporter: “My plan was to not disband the Iraqi Army but to keep the majority of it and use them. And the reason for that is we needed them, because, number one, there were never enough people there for security. [A US military commander told him the US Army was guarding a lot of places it had not planned to guard.] So we said, OK, we’ll bring the Army back. Our plan was to bring back about 250,000 of them. And I briefed [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld. He agreed. [Deputy Defense Secretary] Wolfowitz agreed. [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice agreed. [CIA Director] George [Tenet] agreed. Briefed the president on it. He agreed. Everybody agreed. So when that decision [to disband] was made, I was stunned.” Iraqi Colonel's Reaction - US and UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer will later say of the decision: “One Iraqi colonel told me, ‘You know, our planning before the war was that we assumed that you guys couldn’t take casualties, and that was obviously wrong.’ I looked at him and said, ‘What makes you think that was wrong?’ He goes, ‘Well, if you didn’t want to take casualties, you would have never made that decision about the Army.’” [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]

In a talk given at UCLA’s Center for International Relations, retired General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of the US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM - see April 17, 2003 and After and January 2003), discusses his early planning for the overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the inevitable chaos that would ensue, in plans called “Desert Crossing” (see April-July 1999). Zinni began working on the plans shortly after 1998’s “Desert Fox” bombing campaign (see December 16-19, 1998). Plans to Overthrow, No Plans to Reconstruct - He recalls: “[I]t struck me then that we had a plan to defeat Saddam’s army, but we didn’t have a plan to rebuild Iraq. And so I asked the different agencies of government to come together to talk about reconstruction planning for Iraq.… I thought we ought to look at political reconstruction, economic reconstruction, security reconstruction, humanitarian need, services, and infrastructure development. We met in Washington, DC. We called the plan, and we gamed it out in the scenario, Desert Crossing.” Many of Subsequent Problems Envisioned - Zinni says that he and his team envisioned many of the problems encountered after the March 2003 invasion and subsequent toppling of the Iraqi government: “The first meeting surfaced all the problems that have exactly happened now. This was 1999. And when I took it back and looked at it, I said, we need a plan. Not all of this is a military responsibility. I went back to State Department, to the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, Department of Commerce, and others and said, all right, how about you guys taking part of the plan. We need a plan in addition to the war plan for the reconstruction. Not interested. Would not look at it.” Zinni, he recalls, decided to have the plans created himself, “because I was convinced nobody in Washington was going to plan for it, and we, the military, would get stuck with it.” Zinni Plans Ignored by Bush Planners - Before the invasion, he recalls, he recommended that the military planners go back and look at his plans: “When it looked like we were going in [to Iraq], I called back down to CENTCOM and said, ‘You need to dust off Desert Crossing.’ They said, ‘What’s that? Never heard of it.’ So in a matter of just a few years it was gone. The corporate memory. And in addition I was told, ‘We’ve been told not to do any of the planning. It would all be done in the Pentagon.’” Zinni’s original plans called for a civilian occupation authority with offices in all 18 Iraqi provinces; the current Coalition Provisional Authority only has one set of offices, in Baghdad’s Green Zone. And Zinni’s plans called for around 400,000 troops, instead of the 160,000 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved. [John Prados, 11/4/2006]

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA - see April 17, 2003 and After and January 2003) notes in an internal report that while it lacks an accurate personnel count, it “believe[s] it had a total of 1,196 workers” in Baghdad, about half the authorized number. The Pentagon made up the shortfall by turning to the White House Liaison Office to recruit workers. The Liaison Office normally vets political appointees, and is staffed by right-wing ideologues with little practical experience outside Washington. As a result, the Liaison Office has sent hundreds of recruits to Baghdad who, in the phrasing of the CPA Inspector General, have “inconsistent skill sets.” Author and public policy professor Alasdair Roberts later notes that what the recruits lack in experience, ability, and qualifications, they make up in dogmatic adherence to right-wing ideology. One telling example is the group of CPA workers who manage the multi-billion dollar budget for the Iraqi government. Few, if any, have ever been to the Middle East, nor do any of them speak any of the region’s languages. None have any experience handling budgets of any real size. They are a group of recent college graduates, all in their twenties, who had submitted resumes for unrelated, lower-level jobs through the conservative Heritage Foundation. Roberts later writes, “The inexperience and partisanship of many CPA workers encouraged them to seize the moment and pursue reforms that were unneeded or impractical,” implementing what Roberts calls a “radical reconstruction of Iraqi society” based on neoconservative and fundamentalist dogma, with no understanding of, or concern for, Iraqi society. Many of the proposed reforms are later shelved as unworkable and dangerously provocative; one plan, to privatize Iraq’s state-run enterprises, is set aside for fear that it would lead to “popular unrest.” Most of the staff spend little time in Iraq before returning home; one CPA adviser calls them “90-day wonders getting their tickets punched that said, ‘I’ve been in Baghdad.’” [Roberts, 2008, pp. 127-128]

In his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, author and New York Times media critic Frank Rich writes that President Bush never entered Iraq with any idea of “nation-building.” Bush “never talked about building a democracy in Iraq” during the planning and marketing of the invasion, Rich writes. “The reason he didn’t talk about it was not that he was consciously trying to keep a hidden, hard-to-sell motive secret. The record shows that, for once, Bush’s private convictions actually did match his public stance. Neither he nor the administration had any intention of doing any nation-building. The war plan was an easy exercise in regime change, a swift surgical procedure, after which the Iraqis would be left to build their own democracy by spontaneous civic combustion, like Eastern Europeans after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Americans would hang around in small numbers, perhaps, to protect the oil ministry—the only institution they did protect after routing Saddam. Every single administration action of the time confirms that nation-building was not in the cards. That’s why General Jay Garner was picked as the top American official after the fall of Baghdad (see January 2003): The White House wanted a short-term military emissary rather than a full-dress occupation administrator because the job description required only that he manage a quick turnaround of power to the Iraqis and an immediate exit for American troops. That’s why [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and the war cabinet bought a Tommy Franks plan to draw down those troops from 130,000 to 30,000 by the fall of 2003. It’s also why the only serious prewar plan for rebuilding Iraq, the State Department’s ‘Future of Iraq’ project, was shelved by the White House (see April 2002-March 2003). General Anthony Zinni’s ‘Desert Crossing’ plan for Iraq occupation, which he bequeathed to Franks, his successor, was also shunted aside (see April-July 1999). Any such bothersome little details were entrusted instead to the Defense Department’s Douglas Feith, whose only (non) qualification was that he had been a loyal provider of cherry-picked Iraq intelligence to [Vice President Dick] Cheney and [Cheney’s then-chief of staff Lewis ‘Scooter’] Libby before the war.… Had nation-building been in the White House’s plan, surely someone would have bothered to investigate what nation was being rebuilt.” Even after Garner’s replacement by Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer (see May 11, 2003), nation-building wasn’t on the agenda. The two heads of “private-sector development” in Iraq were, in Rich’s words, “a former Bush campaign finance chair in Connecticut and a venture capitalist who just happened to be [then-press secretary] Ari Fleischer’s brother.” The CPA was staffed by “twentysomethings with no foreign service experience or knowledge of Arabic simply because they had posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation (see June 25, 2004).… The ‘nation-building’ that America finally did undertake was an improvised initiative, heavier on PR than on achievement, to justify the mission retroactively. Only then did the war’s diehard defenders disingenuously grandfather it in as a noble calling contemplated by the Bush White House from the start.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 213-214]

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